Segoe, Ladislas

From 1921 through 1968, the career of Ladislas Segoe (1894–1983) paralleled the evolution of planning. Frequently instrumental in the development and perfection of American planning practice, he was involved in all levels and nearly all fields of planning. Through his widespread and successful consulting work, his publishing, and his speaking, Segoe was a tireless advocate of independent, professional planning. Despite the Depression, World War II, and the problems of urban renewal in the 1950s and civic unrest in the 1960s, he maintained a successful planning practice. As noted by David J. Edelman and David J. Allor in 2003, that success was due to the strength of his personality, the coherence of his vision of planning as an encompassing process, his conscientious follow-through, and his insistence that planners be responsible, reasonable, and honest professionals.

An examination of Segoe's work reveals the slow emergence of American planning practice and its institutionalization, as well as the professionalism and the changes that have occurred within it. While the Hungarian-born Segoe began his career in the 1920s as a physical planner in the European tradition of architecture and civil engineering, Edelman and Allor wrote that he developed over time an increasingly broader vision of planning as holistic, comprehensive, and regionally based. That is, he came to the realization that city and regional planning needed to be integrated to be effective, and that this integration should to be accomplished on many levels.

[Page 713]Modern planning in America began in the Progressive Era of American history, the closing decades of the 1800s and the first two decades of the 1900s, as noted by Donald A. Krueckeberg in 1994. And, although Segoe was an accomplished and influential early planning professional, one who advocated the importance of the independent consultant in the planning process, his career peaked too late for him to contribute any particular strand to the origin of the profession (as did Frederick Law Olmstead with his park designs in the late 19th century) or to be one of the pioneers of the profession (as were some of the earliest American planners, such as Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett with their 1909 Plan of Chicago and John Nolen and Charles Eliot, both of whom emerged from the landscape architecture tradition just after Olmsted). An examination of Segoe's career, centered as it was on professional practice rather than on expanding planning theory in a formal academic sense, adds to our understanding of the development of the planning profession and exemplifies part of what can be referred to as the experience-based heritage of the early planning practitioners.

Along with his mentor, friend, and ally, the Cincinnati lawyer Alfred Bettman, Segoe brought together a number of ideas that have since influenced the planning profession in profound ways. According to Larence Gerkens in 1980, Bettman's belief in planning as a means of social reform and his activity in Ohio, which secured in 1915 enabling legislation at the state level for city planning, led to the establishment of official city planning commissions throughout the state, and later in the nation. Bettman served on the Cincinnati commission from 1925 until 1945, and when the commission hired its first full-time planner, Segoe was chosen. Bettman, Segoe, and John Blandford (later head of the TVA) originated in Cincinnati the idea of an official capital improvements budget, which made it easier to pass capital improvement bond issues, as a feature of long-range comprehensive planning. That feature became part of the plans Segoe completed from then on. While Cincinnati's 1925 plan, prepared under the direction of Segoe, is known as the first comprehensive plan to be officially adopted by the planning commission of a major American city, the 1948 revision to the plan, which he also directed, is equally as important as the first “metropolitan” master plan.

...